Robert Goddard: Secret Space Visionary

A hundred years ago, on March 16, 1926, Robert Hutchings Goddard launched the world’s first liquid-propellant rocket. It flew 184 feet across a snowy field outside Worcester, Massachusetts, reaching an altitude of about 40 feet. Prof. Goddard’s accomplishment has been long considered a milestone on the road to spaceflight. During the Space Race of the 1950s and 1960s, he was hailed in America as the “Father of Modern Rocketry,” but subsequent historical investigations have painted a more nuanced picture. Due to his penchant for secrecy and his unwillingness to work with anyone but his small team of assistants, Goddard’s technical contributions to rocket technology had little actual influence on other rocket development, even in the United States.

Goddard’s real and fundamental importance was to legitimize the idea that spaceflight was possible and that the rocket was the way to get there. After the Smithsonian released his landmark study, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, at the beginning of 1920, the subsequent, global press flap changed how the public viewed the rocket. It was then an unimpressive technology, largely confined to launching fireworks and signal flares. Suddenly, rockets became the dominant means of space travel in popular science and science fiction. It was the extraordinary, unintentional effect of Goddard’s dry, specialized 79-page treatise.

Goddard, a shy, introverted physics professor at Clark University in Worcester, had deliberately buried what few advanced spaceflight ideas he mentioned, such as the possibility of liquid fuels, in the notes in the back of A Method. But he did discuss the possibility of hitting the Moon with a multi-stage, solid-propellant rocket, setting off a flash-powder charge to see if it arrived. A now-lost Smithsonian press release mentioned the idea, setting off a wave of sensationalism in the press. In the aftermath, Goddard was by no means the recluse he is often made out to be. He wrote several articles and gave a number of speeches, but his intent was to educate the public and reign in the wild speculation that he was about to launch himself to the Moon.

What he didn’t talk about was his remarkable vision for the future of space travel. That March, as the hubbub began to die down, Goddard sent a confidential report to his primary funder, Charles Greeley Abbot, the director of the Smithsonian’s Astrophysical Observatory (Abbot was later the head of the Smithsonian from 1928-1944). Titled “Concerning Further Developments of the Rocket Method of Investigating Space,” it laid out a series of ideas he had been working on for at least 15 years. He began with the idea of robotic spacecraft with cameras to orbit or even land on other planets—rather extraordinary because of the obsession of early spaceflight pioneers with launching humans. He discussed heatshield technology for high-speed entry of probes into planetary atmospheres and the possibility of communicating with aliens that our intent was benign. He expanded at length on propulsion with liquid hydrogen and oxygen.

In the next section, “Investigations Conducted with an Operator” (the word astronaut had yet to be invented), Goddard asserted the necessity of using the high-energy combination of hydrogen and oxygen for human spaceflight and discussed the production of these propellants on planetary bodies. He mentioned landing at the poles of the Moon or a planet and using sunlight to electrolyze frozen water— an idea ahead of its time, as utilizing ice in the permanently shadowed craters at the lunar south pole is driving the current U.S. and Chinese lunar programs.

Exploiting solar energy is a concept that looms very large in the report and he speculates on using it to accelerate rocket exhaust. That was followed by a longer section on what we now call electric or ion propulsion, generating electricity with sunlight to expel an ionized stream of atomic particles. He even described preliminary ion-propulsion experiments he had done at Clark University. Goddard ended by asserting that no new principles of physics were required and his methods were the most efficient and feasible available. He concluded: “In view of these facts, together with the tremendous interest and importance of the subject, it is believed that an appeal for public support is justifiable.” Goddard seemed momentarily carried away by the public enthusiasm for his work in early 1920.

There is no evidence that Abbot ever responded to this visionary piece, let alone contemplated a public appeal for financial support for spaceflight. He wanted the Clark University physicist to fulfill his promises and develop the rocket to the point where it could lift instruments into the upper atmosphere to measure solar radiation, the main program of Smithsonian astrophysics. Three years later, Abbot would respond to another such Goddard paper with a slightly exasperated letter, telling him to focus on getting to a working device that could fulfill that goal—what would later be called a “sounding rocket.”  

Earlier, in January 1918, Goddard wrote an even more mind-stretching piece called “The Last Migration” and gave it to a colleague sealed in an envelope, but then wrote a more succinct version the same day called “The Ultimate Migration.” It contemplated how the human race could migrate to an extrasolar planet when the Sun began to die. He speculated about using atomic energy to propel a starship with its crew in suspended animation for a journey that might last for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Some of these ideas had been anticipated by the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky; others developed them in parallel to Goddard or in the following decades. But no one knew about his visionary ideas or “The Ultimate Migration” until that piece was published in 1963—18 years after his death.

Despite his momentary enthusiasm for a public appeal in spring 1920, Robert Goddard remained fundamentally afraid of being cast as a crackpot and was preoccupied with establishing his priority in spaceflight ideas and inventions through private documents and patents. This is unfortunate and resulted in minimizing his influence over both rocketry and advanced space-travel concepts. It was the German-Romanian Hermann Oberth who, more than anyone else, launched the international discussion of future space technologies when he published The Rocket into Interplanetary Space (in German) in 1923. That, plus rumors about Goddard’s Moon rocket, prompted early Soviet space enthusiasts to rediscover Tsiolkovsky, who had published in Russian as early as 1903. Goddard was not happy, feeling that his priority was threatened. But he stuck to his ways and worked to master liquid-propellant rocket technology. Whatever his faults, it’s hard not to admire his extraordinary farsightedness.

For those who wish to view the Museum’s important collection of Goddard objects, his flash-powder experiment box, May 1926 rocket, December 1928 Hoopskirt rocket and 1935 A-series rocket can be found in the Museum building on the National Mall. His 1941 P-series rocket and a model of his March 1926 rocket can be seen at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. Many other small Goddard objects can also be seen at both locations.

Michael J. Neufeld and Frank H. Winter are retired former curators of rockets and missiles at the Museum. Both have published extensively on the history of rocketry and spaceflight.